What if Netscape had won?
By Charles Cooper
March 14, 2003, 4:00 AM PT
It's anniversary season in Silicon Valley. When March 10 rolled around, the
San Francisco Bay Area's media dutifully marked the three-year anniversary
of the peak of the Internet frenzy with the usual menu of "then and now"
stories. Truth be told, it was a date few people in this region--let alone
the wider computer industry--cared to fix in their calendars.
Almost 5,000 Internet companies have either been acquired or gone bust
since 1999, and the computer industry, which boomed during the go-go era,
is still dealing with the fallout from the dot-com collapse. But another
big anniversary is around the bend: Next month will mark 10 years since the
invention of the Mosaic Web browser, a seminal development that led to the
subsequent creation of Netscape.
Netscape these days survives as a desolate outpost in the vast AOL Time
Warner empire, something akin to banishment to Irkutsk. Note to AOL's
people in PR: Don't bother calling to explain why I'm wrong and how this
forgotten software unit still plays a critical part in the overall
company's future. It ain't happening. In fact, the only reason more critics
aren't seizing on the utter embarrassment that is today Netscape is because
they're having too much fun picking on senior management for their laundry
list of blunders.
You don't need to be a "Netscapee" to bemoan the demise of what once was
the hottest company in the tech kingdom. I'm not going to waste time
revisiting the much-chronicled sequence of events that led to its besting
by Microsoft and subsequent acquisition by America Online. But what might
have been had Netscape won--or at a minimum, not lost--the browser war
against Microsoft? Indulge me for a moment.
Windows RIP
Microsoft needed to take out Netscape because nothing less than the future
of the Windows desktop monopoly was at stake. If Netscape had successfully
transformed the Internet browser into a popular middleware platform, the
need for a proprietary computing operating system would have become
increasingly irrelevant, and Bill Gates might have wound up turning into
the next Chris Hassett. Remember him? My point exactly.
Finally, a truly cool browser
There's nothing particularly bad about the current state of browser
technology--that is if you are frozen in a time warp, circa 1999. But for
the rest of the Internet-surfing inhabitants of planet Earth, Netscape
these days survives as a desolate outpost in the vast AOL Time Warner
empire, something akin to banishment to Irkutsk.
Internet browser design stopped being interesting years ago. That's simply
because Microsoft no longer faces any challenge that forces it to innovate.
If Microsoft were still trailing behind Netscape, Internet Explorer would
be a far better product. That's what competition's all about. If the
forward and back arrows constitute the last stage in Internet browser
interface design, then we're an awfully sorry lot.
A new set of tech gurus
Silicon Valley's cult of personality would embrace Jim Clark, Jim Barksdale
and Marc Andreessen. At the very least, they'd still be relevant to the
technology conversation. They had their 15 minutes of fame, but we're now
back to hanging on Bill Gates' every last word--just as we were when I
first began covering the tech beat in 1985. So much for regime change.
The end of the PC
Applications that would have sat on top of the browser would have been
smaller and not dependent on Wintel designs. Would it have signaled the end
of the PC as we know it? Perhaps not but a Netscape-centric would have
cleared the way for a multiplicity of new devices and applications, such as
browsing from your home phone. At the very least, the open-source movement
would have found solid footing sooner than it eventually did.
I know more than a few of you are ready to give me an argument. But while
we can debate the ifs, buts and what-might-have-beens until the cows come
home, the computing world is not better off as a result of Netscape's
diminution to the point of irrelevance. And now it's your turn. Best
response wins a Melinda Gates autographed copy of Microsoft Bob. Write me.
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